Good Faith Collaboration

The Culture of Wikipedia

Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig

Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted,
and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and
quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a
realization of the centuries-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good
Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic
portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much
debated legacy.

Praise for Good Faith Collaboration

"Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and
unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's the
collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny,
serious, and full-tilt committed to the project, even if it means setting aside
personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the
community makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —Cory
Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and cultural
norms of the community which collaborates to produce Wikipedia. His rich
research and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital media
research are well presented. Stylistically, the book was a pleasure to read.
Good Faith Collaboration is an important contribution to understanding
the collaborative culture of media production and the open content community.
The production processes and practices of Wikipedia represent a fascinating
tale in media ethnography." —Lee Humphreys,Journal of
Communication.

"Joseph Reagle's account of what makes Wikipedia tick debunks the vision of
a shining Alexandria gliding towards free and perfect knowledge and replaces it
with something far more awe-inspiring: a humane, and human, enterprise that
with each fitful back-and-forth elicits the best from those it draws in. In an
era of polemic and cheap shots that some attribute largely to the Internet's
influence, he shows how even those of wildly varying backgrounds who disagree
intensely can see themselves as embarked on a common, ennobling mission
grounded in respect and reason." —Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law,
Harvard Law School and Kennedy School, Professor of Computer Science, Harvard
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and author of The Future of the Internet — And How
to Stop It

"Joseph Reagle is one of a very few people who are both deeply engaged
participants in online community and first-rate scholars of it. In Good
Faith Collaboration he provides the best explanation to date of how a
communally created encyclopedia went from 'crazy idea' to the most important
reference work in the English language in less than ten years, and what
Wikipedia's massive global experiment in its collaborative culture means for
the future of ours." —Clay Shirky, NYU, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of
Organizing Without Organizations